Hell's Maw (15 page)

Cáscara fixed Grant with a stern look. “Do you have a better explanation?”

“Scientific evidence for spontaneous human combustion is a gray area,” Corcel chimed in, taking a chair beside his partner. “While there have been multiple reports dating back hundreds of years, the real reasons for the phenomenon have never been satisfactorily confirmed. For a body to just—
pop!
—set alight without an external trigger defies all that we understand about science, surely.”

“Does it matter why it occurs?” Shizuka asked. “The fact that we just saw…something happen in front of our eyes cannot be denied. That woman set alight, and there was no external source to trigger that.”

“It was as if she willed it to happen,” Cáscara observed.

“Yeah, after she'd said the name of her mistress,” Grant added. “Ereshkigal. Whoever
she
is. You know her? She a local player?”

Cáscara shook her head and so did Corcel. “I don't recognize the name,” Corcel confirmed, and his partner agreed.

At that moment, a Pretor's head popped around the edge of the open doorway, drawing everyone's attention. The Pretor was young and female with round, freckled cheeks and blond hair neatly tied back in a bun. “Juan, Emiliana—your subject is dead,” the Pretor said. “Couldn't be revived. It was pronounced by Baroja two minutes ago.”

Corcel nodded. “Thanks, Dor.”

The uniformed Pretor departed, leaving the group to their discussion.

“You think she was alive?” Grant asked bleakly after a moment's consideration.

The two Pretors looked at him strangely.

“Before the fire?” Corcel queried. “Are you suggesting that Ms. Bella Arran may have already been dead when we interviewed her?”

“That's what she told us, isn't it?” Grant asked. “No reason to question that, is there?”

“There's every reason, Grant,” Corcel said. “Dead people are dead. They don't answer questions.”

Grant was shaking his head. “Now, that's a very narrow view of what it constitutes to be alive or dead,” he said. “I've seen reanimated corpses move under their own power. Never had cause to interview one, but that doesn't mean they couldn't speak.”

Corcel laughed uncomfortably. “You have alluded before to a rather colorful history,” he said, “but this? Well, it sounds preposterous, if you'll forgive my saying so.”

Grant sipped his coffee before speaking. “I won't deny that it does,” he agreed, “but you have to admit that something wasn't right about that woman. She spoke about already being dead and, from what we just saw, she commanded her own body to combust, ending any chance we might have had to learn more.”

“Not ending any chance,” Cáscara piped up. “There are three survivors of the hotel incident who have been placed in recovery in the medical center. Hospitalized, but alive.”

“Three,” Grant acknowledged. “What about the bodies?”

“They're there, too,” Cáscara told him. “In the morgue.”

“Maybe we should go examine both sets,” Grant proposed.

Corcel nodded. “You sure you're both up for this?” he asked, and his gaze rested on Shizuka.

“Wherever Grant goes, there, too, go I,” Shizuka told him.

“Yeah, let's see what we can find out,” Grant said.

“Good,” Corcel said.

“But since we all smell like fire-damaged stock just now,” Cáscara added, “I think we all need to change clothes and freshen up.” She looked at Grant and Shizuka, addressing them. “There are showers on-site and I'm sure we can find something for you to wear. What are you, Grant—XXXL?”

Before Grant could answer, Shizuka raised her hand. “We have clothes at our hotel,” she said, “and it would be convenient to use this time to pick up something I have left there.”

Grant nodded. “Good idea.”

“I'll arrange a patrol wag to run you over,” Corcel told them both, “and we'll reconvene in ninety minutes outside the hospital. I'll give your driver the details.”

“Sounds good, thanks,” Grant said. He was already thinking about something he intended to pick up from his hotel room, but he also planned to use the time to check in with Cerberus and see if he could gather any information on the name Ereshkigal. He suspected that the two Pretors would be doing the same.

“Ereshkigal,” Brigid Baptiste read from the computer screen in the Cerberus redoubt, “was the queen of the underworld in Mesopotamian myth.” The screen showed a transposed copy of an ancient book, detailing the fragmentary myths of ancient Babylon and its surrounds.

Brigid looked very different from the woman of action who had helped topple the land pirate walker just one day earlier. Now she wore a pair of square-framed spectacles, and her brows were furrowed as she read.

She was working at a computer terminal in the busy Cerberus operations room, located in a hidden redoubt within a hollowed-out mountain of the Bitterroot Mountain Range in what used to be Montana. The room was a vast space with a high roof and pleasing, indirect lighting. Its ceiling looked like the roof of a cave. Within that space, twin aisles of computer terminals—twenty-four in all—ran from left to right, facing a giant screen on which material could be flagged. A giant Mercator map dominated one wall, showing the world before the nukecaust had reshaped the coastlines of North America and other locales. The Mercator map was peppered with glowing locator dots that were joined to one another with dotted lines of diodes, creating an image reminiscent of the kind of flight maps that airlines had given to passengers in the twentieth century. The indicated routes were not flight paths, however, but rather they showed the locations and
connections of the sprawling mat-trans network. Developed for the US military, the majority of the units were located within North America, but a few outposts could be seen farther afield.

A separate chamber was located in one corner of the room, far from the wide entry doors. This chamber had reinforced armaglass walls tinted a coffee-brown color. Contained within was the Cerberus installation's mat-trans unit, along with a small anteroom that could be sealed off if necessary.

Right now the mat-trans chamber was empty, but the main ops room was buzzing with life as Cerberus personnel hurried about their business, the dedicated surveillance and protection of humankind.

The redoubt was built into one of the mountains in Montana's Bitterroot Range, where it was entirely hidden from view. It occupied an ancient military base that had been forgotten and ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust that initiated the twenty-first century. In the years since that conflict, a peculiar mythology had grown up around the mountains with their mysterious, shadowy forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. Now the wilderness surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated, and the nearest settlement could be found in the flatlands some miles away consisting of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog who had befriended the Cerberus exiles many years ago. Sky Dog and his tribe helped perpetuate the myths about the mountains and so kept his friends undisturbed.

Despite the wilderness that characterized its exterior, the redoubt featured state-of-art technology. The facility was manned by a full complement of staff, over fifty in total, many of whom were experts in their chosen field of scientific study and some of whom had been
cryogenically frozen before the nukecaust only to awaken to the harsh new reality.

Cerberus relied on two orbiting satellites at its disposal—the Keyhole Comsat and the Vela-class reconnaissance satellite—which provided much of the data for analysis in their ongoing mission to protect humankind. Gaining access to the satellites had taken long man-hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists on hand at the mountain base. Concealed uplinks were hidden beneath camouflage netting in the terrain around the redoubt, tucked away within the rocky clefts of the mountain range where they chattered incessantly with the orbiting satellites. This arrangement gave the personnel a near limitless stream of feed data surveying the surface of the Earth, as well as providing the almost-instantaneous communication with its agents across the globe, wherever they might be. Just now, the agent on the receiving end of the communication was Grant.

Sitting beside Brigid in the ops room were Lakesh and his second in command, Donald Bry.

Lakesh—or, more properly, Mohandas Lakesh Singh—was the leader of the Cerberus operation and a man with an incredible history with the mat-trans project and this redoubt. A theoretical physicist and cyberneticist, Lakesh had been born in the twentieth century, where his expertise had been applied to the original development of the mat-trans process. Lakesh was of average height and had an aquiline nose and refined mouth. His black hair was swept back from his face, a sprinkling of white showing in the black at the temples and sides. In contrast to his dusky skin, Lakesh had penetrating blue eyes that were alert to every detail. Though he looked to be in his fifties, Lakesh was far older than that—two hundred years older, in fact. A combination of cryogenic hibernation and organ replacement had seen Lakesh emerge in the
twenty-third century as the leader of what had begun as a covert rebellion against Baron Cobalt but had ultimately developed into something even more noble—the Cerberus organization.

Bry was a young man in his thirties with a curly mop of ginger hair and a permanent expression of worry on his face.

Standing beside these two men, propped against an unmanned desk in the impressive ops room, was Kane. He was dressed in muted colors and had washed and shaved since their encounter with the land pirates in Samariumville. All of them had been connected to Grant via the linked network of Commtacts, and right now, halfway across the world, Grant was listening to Brigid's voice as she summarized everything she could find or recall about the mysteriously named mistress of the dead bomber.

“Her story varies from myth to myth,” Brigid explained as she scanned the text, “but they by and large agree upon her role. She was the queen of Irkalla, the land of the dead or the underworld in Mesopotamian legend, a little like Hades in Greek mythology. Considered a goddess, Ereshkigal passed judgment for the underworld and set its laws.

“According to the
Doctrine of Two Kingdoms
, the dominion of Ereshkigal was markedly different from the natural world of her sister Ishtar, and so formed opposites—life and death.”

“With Ereshkigal being the principle for death,” Lakesh clarified with a grim nod. “It seems, then, that you were right to contact us with your concerns, Grant,” he stated into the Commtact pickup mic he wore on a headset. Lakesh did not have a Commtact surgically embedded beneath his skin like the field agents, so relied instead on plug-ins like this one to communicate. “This matter you've happened upon in Spain appears to concern the Annunaki.”

“Wouldn't it just,” Grant growled over the Commtact, the despair clear from his tone.

The Annunaki had caused no end of trouble for the Cerberus warriors, dating all the way back to before the official formation of the Cerberus organization when an Annunaki overlord called Enlil had masqueraded as the Baron of Cobaltville. An incredibly long-lived race, the Annunaki came from the distant planet of Nibiru thousands of years earlier. Once on Earth, their technology had given the appearance of magic to primitive humankind. They had been elevated to the level of gods in myths that had survived for over six thousand years. The Annunaki's control of humankind had receded over time, but they had made a new stab at absolute control in recent years, leading to the destruction of their starship,
Tiamat
, and the apparent death of the last of their number. The Cerberus warriors had been there to witness both events and were responsible for the campaign that had seen the end to the Annunaki's influence, but they knew better than to believe the Annunaki to be dead. The hateful race had a remarkable talent for surviving against impossible odds and an irritating habit of being reborn when things went sour. Ereshkigal, however, was a new name to most of the Cerberus team, and they had never encountered her before.

“Enlighten us, Baptiste—what can this Ereshkigal bitch do?” Kane asked with a sneer.

“Here,” Brigid said as she tapped out a quick pattern on the computer's keyboard. An image came up on screen showing a stone carving that clearly dated back thousands of years. Weatherworn and simplistic, the carving showed a stylized image of a bare-breasted woman with large eyes and a crown or headdress of narrow spikes. Two wings spread out behind her, low to her shoulders.

“Ereshkigal was worshipped in ancient Mesopotamia,” Brigid explained, “and there is documented evidence to
suggest that she had a temple in the city of Kutha, which was located on the eastern branch of the Upper Euphrates, north of Nippur.”

“Enlil's city,” Kane recalled.

Brigid nodded. “And close to Babylon also, in modern-day Iraq. A nineteenth-century archaeologist called George Rawlinson found the first references to this—a brick of King Nabu-Kudurri-Usur of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Nabu-Kudurri-Usur—or Nebuchadrezzar II, if you prefer—was the man responsible for the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon as well as the destruction of Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. He features in the Bible in the Book of Daniel.”

“So, she was loved and worshipped by people in high places,” Kane surmised. “But what did she do?”

“Yeah,” Grant chipped in over the Commtact link. “What are we up against here?”

“The myths vary,” Brigid admitted, “but one thing is clear—the other gods feared Ereshkigal. She had power that they didn't—power over death.”

“So this is the god that gives the other gods nightmares,” Kane reasoned. “That can't be good.”

“No, it can't,” Brigid agreed. “At various times, Ereshkigal was the ruler or joint ruler of the underworld along with her husband, Nergal. Nergal, the god of plague, was forced to marry her after he had insulted her representative at a banquet, who was also her son—although in taking joint control of her kingdom it may be said that he gained more from the marriage than she did.”